Jón Leifs wrote songs throughout his career, works which ‘give unusually clear insights into the composer’, according to Árni Heimir Ingólfsson’s booklet-notes, and which were shaped by the composer’s interest in Icelandic literature and folksong pretty much from the start.

Despite that breadth, Leifs has a consistent modus operandi. The voice is most often enveloped by a rich piano sound that cascades steadily through huge tectonic chords like flowing lava. Those chords are often shape-shifting, modal entities subjected to sudden unprepared modulations. Sometimes the progression of chords explodes into something more motoric or recedes into something more reflective. Sometimes, as in the first of the Two Songs, Op 18a, and the second of the Love Verses from the Edda, Op 18b, the piano’s steamroller underlay reaches a level of crushing intensity that flings the voice into soaring lyricism. Almost always, the vocal progression is shaped by the distinctive metre of the Icelandic verse (hymns, Romantic poetry and excerpts from the sagas).

This entire collection is dark, thrilling and terrifying. Leifs has a direct way with melody, which despite its irregularities often has a pleasing, Reger-like geometry. His short, heroic ‘character sketches’ for the Saga Symphony are distinctive even within the consistency of approach described above. Perhaps the ‘Dance of the Spectres’ from Three Songs, Op 23, is a little hackneyed in its pianistic description of the macabre; elsewhere Leif’s freshness and individuality is present from his lullabies and simple hymn settings to the thrusting grief of a piece such as ‘Torrek’, a response to the drowning of his daughter Líf off the coast of Sweden.

At his best, Finnur Bjarnason is magnificent. He has the breakaway lyricism of a verismo character and the in-your-ear intimacy of a Lieder singer. He offers pride, anger, isolation, hesitance, doubt and despair across a huge volume range; the voice has a consistently free, open sound despite its grain and useful (in this repertoire) edge. Örn Magnússon, strident at the piano, pushes Bjarnason to further and further despair in these 2000/01 recordings initially made for Smekkleysa. Anyone who has been fascinated or troubled by the stark black rock on which Iceland is built – literally and literarily – should find plenty to reflect on here.